Yeah, what he said. It seems that I’m not the only person out there going through a nightmare trying to install Adobe CS3. The blogger over at CrucialLimit.com has posted his experience and it’s the same as mine - error screen for error screen.

Hey CrucialLimit guy, Thanks for going through the effort of documenting your horror story so that I can just say, “Ditto!”

Maybe this weekend I’ll try that solution you found. If that doesn’t work I’m going to send a bill to Adobe for the hours that I spent installing -> uninstalling ( 1 hour ), installing, uninstalling, cursing, cleaning, registry editing, installing, cursing my fate, uninstalling (1 hour), cleaning, cleaning, cleaning installing, kicking the dog . . .

(Note: I couldn’t really kick my dog so I played the Seahawks vs Browns in Madden ‘07 and just beat the frak out of them 113 - 10.)

Flashmagazine is reporting about the huge price differences for the CS3 Web Premium edition in countries outside of North America. In today’s world how is this going to fly? What’s to prevent someone from buying in the US and selling them on eBay to people in Europe? (I’ve never used eBay so I don’t have a clue how stuff like that works.)

Flashmagazine suggests that Europeans fly over here and buy there own copies. They get a vacation and save a few dollars. With that in mind I’d love a free trip to Italy. If it’s not illegal I’ll bring you a few copies. You pay for airfare and the US cost for the suite and we’ll call it even.  :-) I think I’m joking here but then again, what the hell?

Note: much that follows is sarcasm. I can’t wait to play with all the shinny new toys in CS3/Flex/Apollo….

Adobe, I’m really pissed at you. I just read a review of some of the features that Photoshop CS3 has coming, a few of which aren’t in the beta. They sound amazing. So amazing that I’d really like to get back into photography just for the joy of photo editing. But you know what? I don’t have the fraking time!

Why don’t I have the time? Well, let’s go down the list:

First and foremost as a professional Flash developer I have to stay on top of all the features. I have a pretty good handle on that. AS3 is a challenging switch but it’s coming along. If that were it I’d be golden but noooooo.

Because there’s Flex to learn. I already have an idea for a project to build in Flex so I have to get that going. Flex is awesome and I’ll be a better developer for learning it. And oh yeah, I also have to learn the ins-and-outs of Eclipse. Nice, lets just add another IDE to master while we’re at it.

And gee, I better not take too long getting up to speed on Flex because, wait for it, Apollo is coming out soon. The good news is that it sounds like Apollo development will be very similar to Flex. Hopefully it will just be adding onto the feature set. So that helps but it’s still a lot to get a handle on.

I almost forgot, the Flash 9 authoring tool is going to have a new interface and lots of new features, along with all the other CS3 apps. From what I’ve seen I really like it. It won’t take much to get comfortable with it but you know there will be those times when you try to do something you used to do and can’t find the control or something. That will put a small dent in development time until it becomes second nature.

So my dance card is full. I have to keep up with the new features in Flash plus learn Flex and Apollo. That’s doable.

But wait, there’s more. You just added those really cool new features to Photoshop. Now I’ve been around Photoshop for a long time so it’s pretty easy to pick up the new features. That’s not the problem. It’s that I don’t have time for photography any more. Really, photography is very time consuming and I’d love to get back to it if there were time but it just isn’t going to happen. But it’s very tempting with PS CS3.

Adobe, you’ve created some amazing applications that in turn allow your users to create amazing things. Think back to the Stamp tool, how cool was that when it came out. And then someone made a deal with the devil and created the Healing Brush. Plus Flash/Flex/Apollo are the foundation for RIA and it’s possible that Apollo is going to put a huge dent in Microsoft.
So kudos to you Adobe. But before you relax too much I want to be the first person to make a feature request for CS4. Just add this one feature to CS4 and the universe will officially be yours. You ready? Here it is: a Freeze Time button. Just one little button that we can press that will freeze time so that we can learn and play with your products at a nice leisurely pace. You know what. If that’s too much to ask for then just come out with Slow Time for CS4 and then when it’s perfected you can come out with Freeze Time in CS5.